The Internet's core bandwidth continues to double every year. Some of this additional bandwidth is consumed as more and more users access the Internet. Other additional bandwidth is consumed as existing users increase their use of the Internet. This increase of Internet use translates into an increase in traffic directed to and from World Wide Web servers (“Web servers”).
Replacing a Web server with another Web server having twice the capacity is a costly undertaking, whereas merely adding the new Web server(s) is less costly but usually requires a load-balancing mechanism to balance workload so that each virtual server performs work proportional to its capacity. Network traffic management devices positioned between client devices and the Web servers typically handle the load balancing functions, which typically more processing of data packets communicated between the client devices and Web servers. With increasing traffic, the network traffic management device will eventually not be able to process traffic in a timely manner.
For software assisted hardware acceleration, at connection establishment, a software module may push connection flow signature and transformation data to a hardware device to perform acceleration on the flow. The flow signature and transformation data is typically pushed in a single transaction in which the signature and transformation data is embedded with the flow header and data. Accordingly, two flow signature and transformation entries may be created accordingly. This approach incorrectly assumes that these two flows are symmetric and are reversible. However, for an asymmetric flow connection, the client-to-server and server-to-client flows have different flow signature and transformation information. Therefore, the flow may be accelerated in one direction while the flow in the other direction may not be properly accelerated.
What is needed is a system and method for achieving hardware acceleration for asymmetric flow connections.